Creating Conversions With A Landing Page

Question: What is the purpose of a landing page? The answer: a landing page is designed to achieve a specific marketing goal--usually something along the lines of collecting contact information, driving traffic, or pushing for a purchase. However, before you just throw some text and a form on a page and call it a day, you should know that there is a process to creating an optimized, more effective landing page.

The Basic Design

Compared to the other pages on your website, your landing pages should be considerably simpler and cleaner in appearance, allowing no confusion as to what the page’s goal is. This means that there should be no menus in the header or footer, and all important information should be presented above the fold. This means that your copy is immediately visible to your visitor.

The Copy

When composing the copy for your landing page, you need to make sure that you stay on message. This is for a landing page, after all, which means that your visitor navigated to that page for a very specific reason. You need to make sure that they see that they are in the right place for them to accomplish that reason. This can be helped by matching the headline of the landing page to the copy that your visitor clicked to link to it.

As far as the rest of the landing page is concerned, it is best to follow the KISS rule (but in this case, KISS stands for “Keep It Simple, Scannable”). Your landing page shouldn’t be the next great work of literature, it should clearly and quickly present your offer and direct your visitor to fill out the included form. This means that you need to help your visitor stay focused on the end goal by being focused yourself.

Remember, the main purpose of the landing page is to direct the visitor to complete the included form. In order to achieve this key consideration, your form should meet certain practices.

The Form

Quick question for you: are more, or fewer, fields included on your landing page forms better for your conversion rates? If you said more, you’re absolutely right. It is common for a more valuable offer to have a longer form to fill out. Therefore, if you’re offering a sign up for a webinar or a downloadable ebook, you would utilize a longer form.

Ideally, your form should be completely visible above the fold, or without making your visitor scroll--but what if you want to get as much information as possible from a single form? Fortunately, there’s a fix for this as well: multi-step landing pages.

Multi-step landing pages can help boost your conversion rates and get you more information on your visitors. Instead of listing all of the form questions at once, multi-step landing pages separate the questions into multiple, easily-managed stages. This allows you to collect much more information about your target by asking them for data in bite-sized pieces.

For instance:

‘Bite’ one is the time to ask an easy, non-committal question to help encourage continued conversion. It helps to ask a question whose answer will not be influenced by the price of your service, or vice versa. For example, asking for a zip code or other relatively vague detail is a good strategy for bite one.

‘Bite’ two is where you ask the questions most directly related to your service (number of users and location, things like that) in order to better provide your contact with the service that they immediately need.

‘Bite’ three is where you confirm that their information is being put together, and where you should have them confirm their name and contact information. This is also a good place to have your contact identify any other services they may be interested in, in addition to the subject of the landing page. So, if your landing page was in reference to the security solutions you have to offer, you could include Backup and Data Recovery as a service your contact might also want more information on.

As you collect your contact’s contact information, you should make sure to deliver an impression that this contact should expect further correspondence shortly. This helps communicate that you are working as quickly as you can to resolve their needs, and primes your contact to listen to your expertise.

Elements That Boost Conversion Rates

As you put together your landing page, there are certain features that you should incorporate to help encourage conversions. For instance, video content.

Utilizing video content on a landing page can give about an 80% boost to conversion rates.

Images and other graphics can also provide a boost, if not as considerable as that provided by video.

Another means of boosting conversion rates is to remove any risk of giving your offer a try. Free trials accomplish this goal very well, giving your target something that they will grow to rely on before their trial expires.

Finally, it never hurts to make sure that the right audience sees the right message. This can be established by taking a few measurements. To analyze traffic type, you can establish which channel was best at drawing in successful conversions. Furthermore, you can assign an identical landing page to each channel--whether it's email, social media, or PPC--to see which was most effective with your particular audience.

The same can be said of user types. Your marketing is much more likely to be effective if you can identify which contacts are most likely to want to take action, and are in a position to do so. This means you will want to establish which contacts on your list are in the decision-making positions at their respective companies.

In conclusion, a landing page is one of the most powerful tools at your disposal to drive your audience forward--as long as it is designed to be effective enough to do so. For assistance with your landing page creation, or any of your other marketing needs, be sure to contact us,

About the author

Chris is a hopeless Technology Fanatic, an Inbound & Outbound Marketing Expert as well as an Senior IT Advisor, Web, Graphics & Software Designer. When he's not running Directive and JoomConnect he's probably sharpening his skills as an Amateur Photographer and Filmmaker. Chris lives with his wife Charlotte and their 2 sons in Upstate NY. Visit his photography site at www.directivestudios.com.